Friday, February 24, 2012

Dianics, Discrimination and the Dust of the Dying

As is not infrequently the case with me, I find a comment that I made in anger actually pointed the way toward a better understanding of the problem at hand. Responding to a Dianic who has repeatedly posted anti-transgender comments, I said:

Eruca:

So how does it feel to be poor, aging, reliant on government charity to sustain your existence, and rejected as irrelevant by all but a few similarly poor, aging and equally irrelevant bigots?

Your curse, should you choose or not choose to accept it, is to watch the rest of the world pass you by as they take the achievements you and yours gave them into directions which you never anticipated and which you are powerless to control.

Have a happy walk to the shadowlands.

Oh, wait... you're already there.

Perhaps I could have phrased it a bit more gently, but it's never a good idea to expect tact at 3:00am when I just changed a dirty diaper and have had my fill of early morning excreta. And as I counted to 50, thought about editing the comment and then decided it was fine the way it was, I realized just how much painful truth there was in those paragraphs.

By her own admission, Eruca is a disabled Dianic lesbian. Should her hated patriarchy decide to stop sending her a monthly check, she would starve in the street. She is forced to rely on whatever scraps The Man throws in her general direction. The sisters of her generation are as powerless as she, and the sisters of the generations which came after her have left eldercare to the tender mercies of Uncle Sam. The Great Womyn's Communities the separatists dreamed of in the second wave never came to pass: all that is left are a few lonely old dears remembering better days and buying day-old produce with their food stamps.

Which brings us to Z Budapest.

I said in another comment that I felt it was tragic that Z has chosen to tear down her legacy like this. Instead of being remembered for the 40+ years of work she did for the Womyn's community, she's going to be seen as a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Transgender bigot. But then I realized that hateful statement on someone else's blog has brought her more attention than she has received in a couple of decades. Were she not remembered as a bigot, she'd be remembered as a quaint curiosity... if she were remembered at all.

The simple fact that for every nine people there that were protesting there was one attendee to her ritual made it all clear! She does not represent the majority of us, we represent the majority. She is not a leader that can be voted out of office, she is not a politician who lobbies for the exclusion of trans individuals, she is a woman who comes from a particular world view that we as a greater community no longer feel to be valid in our modern times. She is the past and we are the future.

This is the path Z and her followers have chosen to stay in the public eye: this is the way they hope to remain a vital part of the community which has outgrown them. They stumble about the terrain wondering why the earth no longer shakes for them and why those damn little furry creatures keep eating their eggs. Instead of hatred, we should treat them with pity. Their time has passed and their appointment with the Devouring Mother draws nearer each day. When they have returned to the dust, those who come after them will bleach the rot from their bones and exhibit them as a display of our continuing evolution.